Luchenko wished Turnbull’s end could come thus peacefully, but a Russian premier had the interests of the Russian people to consider. He reached into the breast pocket of his dinner jacket, adorned only by the Order of Lenin, and drew out a black lizard-skin wallet. From it he took a photograph and laid it beside Turnbull’s plate.
Turnbull picked it up and examined it. It was the usual family photograph. Seated in the center was Marshal Evgeniy Luchenko, with a port list from the row upon row of ribbons decorating his uniform jacket. His expression was suitably authoritative. That of the plain woman whose hand rested on his shoulder was resigned, those of the two teenage sons on either side, sullen. “Your family?”
“Yes,” said Luchenko. “I love them very much. And I’d kill them with my own hands if the survival of the Soviet Union demanded it. Yet you won’t even order the dispatch of a criminal troublemaker to save our two countries.”
President Turnbull handed the photo back. “I guess you’ve just defined the difference between Russians and Americans.”
Luchenko tucked the photograph back in his wallet and returned it to his pocket. “One of them, Mr. President. The other is that we Russians plan far ahead, take into consideration every misadventure that might befall us, and take steps to cover each and every contingency.”
“Then you anticipated my reply.”
“I feared it.”
“And you plan to murder Ripley Forte.”
“We plan to, and we will-for the good of both our countries.”
“I must warn you, Premier Luchenko, that I will communicate your intentions to Ripley Forte. I will also order our security forces to take whatever precautions necessary to protect him.”
Luchenko shook his head sadly. “As Julius Caesar said when he crossed the Rubicon, ‘The dice are cast.'”
“‘The die is cast,'” Turnbull corrected him. “Singular, you know.”
“That’s even better,” said Luchenko, “considering we do not share your American enthusiasm for a pluralistic society…”
Half an hour later, having failed to reach a consensus, the diners said their good-byes.
Premier Luchenko walked swiftly back to his hotel suite, where he found his personal physicians awaiting him. Without a word, they stripped off his dinner jacket, handed it, wallet and all, to a waiting KGB man for immediate incineration, and led him to the bathroom. Their own protected by rubber gloves, they bathed both the premier’s hands thoroughly in isopropyl alcohol, followed by scrubbing in strong soap and water. Only when they took a swabbing of the surface of Luchenko’s right fingertips and tested it to make sure that all traces of the vasodilator and fibrillator with which the photograph had been impregnated was removed did they peel off the transparent collodion that covered Luchenko’s fingers and swab them with acetone to remove all traces of the protective layer.
The next morning, at 0130, President Horatio-Francis Turnbull died peacefully in his sleep. Doctors summoned to the bedside at dawn were unanimous in attributing the president’s death to a massive heart attack, a finding supported by a subsequent autopsy.
At noon the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court arrived from Washington to swear in David D. Castle as the forty-fifth President of the United States.
34. TO THE WINNER…
17 NOVEMBER 2009
The South African submarine Natal was cruising, not in the South Atlantic, where the Russians had concentrated their search, or in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of the Republic of Texas where the Americans were convinced it must be, but in the mid-Pacific south of Hawaii. It was there that Ripley Forte received a message from President Tom Traynor that at one last dinner meeting, which ended an hour before, the leaders and their deputies had reluctantly decided to accept Rip-ley Forte’s terms. The transfer of the Russian seat of government to Washington, D.C., and of the American to Kiev, would begin on the morrow.
Ripley Forte pushed his chair back from the desk in his stateroom and read the message again, savoring every word. The accord meant that, henceforth, the life of every living human being was going to be different- radically so. The individual would have to accept a greater share of responsibility for his own actions rather than depend on a distant, faceless civil servant to decide his destiny. Without Big Brother to lean on, the family, the clan, the community would again become the foci of moral and physical development and support. Change in that direction would be rapid but not cataclysmic, for the restraining hand of big government would relax its grip only reluctantly. The weak, inept, and slothful would doubtless suffer the slow extinction Darwin predicted for the unfit as a result of the continuing competition between individuals to reproduce their kind. On the other hand, a new order would challenge the resourceful and inventive to feats of creation that might even rival the fecundity of Renaissance Italy. The world didn’t know it yet, but it was in for heady times.
And so was Ripley Forte.
He folded the radiogram, stuck it in his shirt pocket, and left the tiny room that had a hundred fathoms of blue water for a ceiling. His compartment was in the fo’c’sle among the men and petty officers, while Jennifer Red Cloud, at her insistence, had been quartered with her nanny and their son aft, near the twin water-jets that propelled the ship silently through the depths. He walked down the low narrow passageway, squeezing past crewmen, through the mess hall, past the exercise compartment and missile tubes, to officers’ country. It was the first time he had been beyond the wardroom since the voyage began weeks before. He knocked at the door that bore a neatly lettered card: “MRS. red cloud.”
From within came her voice, dull and listless. “Who is it?”
“Forte.”
The pause was so long that Forte thought she hadn’t heard. He was about to repeat himself when the door was unlocked, and she slipped through the opening into the passageway, closing the door behind her. Inside, somebody shot the bolt home. His son was in there, and Forte wanted nothing more in the world than to see him, but a great calm had descended upon him: he would not only see young Ripley but possess him from now on. “Let’s go to the wardroom,” he said.
He expected protest, but she merely nodded, and preceded him down the passageway. From behind, she looked the same-voluptuous, with long straight legs whose smooth contours it would take more than a pair of tailored gray flannel slacks to conceal, straight black hair to her narrow waist. But as she passed him, he noticed that her face was wan, the eyes brilliant but sunken, as one who is running a fever, the jaw tense. Her Indian intuition, he was sure, had already conveyed the bad news.
Forte held a chair in a corner of the wardroom at one of half a dozen tables bolted to the deck. Two officers who saw them enter-the two Americans who had until this moment remained the length of the ship apart- hastily finished their coffee and left. Forte and Red Cloud were alone.
He went to the coffeemaker and filled two thick white mugs. He put them on the table and sat down facing her. “I’ve missed you, Red.”
“You don’t need to lie,” she said dispiritedly. “You only miss Ripley, and you’ve come to tell me that he no longer belongs to me, haven’t you?”
Forte extracted the radiogram from his pocket and laid it on the table in front of her.
She read it and, like Forte, read it again. “This could be a fake,” she said, looking up. Her eyes didn’t quite focus. “I wouldn’t put it past you bribing a radioman to fake it.”
“You know I didn’t,” Forte said softly.
“Yes, I guess I do. You want Ripley, don’t you?”
“Wasn’t that our agreement?”
“It hasn’t happened yet,” she said, her voice tense, her eyes fearful. “The Russians and Americans are still in Houston. They aren’t going to let you push them around so easily. They’re just leading you on. Just because they agreed doesn’t mean they’ll do what they promised. After all, they’re politicians.”
Forte sipped his coffee. “Give up, Red. I’ve won, and I’ve come for the boy.”
“You can’t have him.”
He cocked an eyebrow at her.
“We were just talking,” she said, her voice rising. “We never did sign any agreement. You don’t have a legal leg to stand on.”
“No, but I have your word. Are you going to tell me you’d lie about a thing like this?”
“The ‘thing’ you’re talking about happens to be my son, and-”
“-and mine.”
“-and I’d not only lie for him, but I’d steal, turn traitor, burn, kill for him,” she shouted. “Do you understand?”
“I’m beginning to.”
“A child needs a mother,” she went on plaintively. “Very well, I concede that he needs a father, too, but before everything else, a mother.”